How to measure engagement on websites without conversions

It’s relatively easy to measure and evaluate ecommerce sites that have easily-identifiable conversions, but what about websites that don’t sell products? We explored estimating ROI on non-ecommerce sites that have online forms for users to complete, but what about websites that don’t have any conversion opportunities for its visitors?

Those sites are more common than you might think, global brands in consumer packaged goods, energy, financial services, and other industries have websites where opportunities for conversion are very rare. Chanel.com for example lets users read about and look at their products but does not have a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button anywhere.

So in the absence of concrete conversions, how do we measure engagement in a meaningful way? Check out Marketing Land’s column A New Approach to Measuring Engagement on Content-Heavy Sites for a solution that adds appropriate weights and scores to different actions that users may take on a website. This approach gives marketers and analysts more specificity in measuring engagement and the ability to measure engagement as a continuous variable.